Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Bob Clampett Hand Drawn Maps of Warner Bros. Cartoon Studio

Rob Clampett, (Bob's son) generously gave me scans of these interesting maps Bob drew of the Warner Bros cartoon studio.I haven't totally deciphered everything on them yet. I like all the little anecdotes Bob added of where funny stuff happened and what stars peered in the windows.I'm guessing Bob drew these to help Mike Barrier and Milt Grey for the research they were doing for a book about the WB cartoons.Besides the historical interest in these maps, I'm also fascinated by Bob's handwriting. It's so cartoony, stylish and spirited, just like his cartoons.

Rob showed me these the other day when Eddie, Milt and I were doing interviews for an upcoming Clampett DVD he is working on. (I made him promise no DVNR!) He will be putting a lot of rare items from the Clampett collection in the supplemental section. I hope he puts on a home movie Bob took of him visiting Milt Gross' house!

34 comments:

Wow - whatta memory! How the hell could he draw up such a detailed schematic of the whole operation decades after the fact, floor-by-floor and production-by-production? And not just the animation department. Clampett seems to have been minutely aware of everything that went on at the studio, including it's back history in silent & early talkie live-action films.

(Noah's Ark, which he identifies as a silent with Myrna Loy playing a slavegirl, just aired on TCM last weekend. Pretty obscure reference. Even more obscure is Larry Semon, a silent comedian who's main claim to fame today is that he used Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy - separately - as comic foils before they were teamed. Jane Withers was a popular child actress that rivaled Shirley Temple for a while. Baby-boomers will remember her best as "Josephine" the Comet Plumber.)

He even remembers where he had lunch with Boris Karloff. (He referenced Karloff a couple of times in his cartoons, in What's Cookin' Doc? for instance, and there was a phony sponsor on Beany and Cecil named "Boris' Car Lot".)

This is all funny to me, because I work at Warners today with a lot of young people who couldn't even tell you who Al Jolson was, let alone which office he occupied during The Jazz Singer. (Actually, the Termite Terrace building no longer exists, and wasn't on the main lot anyway.)

BTW, as one who has authored DVD's, it's important to know JPEG, MPEG and H264 compression codecs will add jaggies and noise halos to line art. Heavy data compression to minimize media size only makes damage worse.

One __can__ DVNR properly and avoid collateral damage, but unless one takes time and money to get it right, it's probably best just to avoid it.

Larry Semon was a cartoonist for the New York Sun before getting into Vaudeville and then movies. He favored broad physical gags and was utterly terrified of someday running out of material. When Semon died in 1928 of pneumonia and tuberculosis after suffering a nervous breakdown egged on by bankruptcy, many storage trunks were found containing tons and tons of unused Semon-penned jokes and ideas, lest he ever run dry in his lifetime. He did not and Warners ended up storing his old props.

Wooow, is that to scale? Termite Terrace is tiiiiny! Sad to hear it doesn't exist anymore. So many doodles long gone. :c

Haha, good to know I wasn't the only one pondering the handwriting. It's neat seeing cartoonists writing out stuff in their own handwriting. Do you know if there's a correlation between neat handwriting and good art skill?

I wish my handwriting had at least as much spirit and balance as my drawing does, but it doesn't. It always looks really laboured to me. I can make (somewhat) graceful-looking lines while thinking up visual ideas, but the same does not seem to apply with words and sentences.

I wish my handwriting had at least as much spirit and balance as my drawing does, but it doesn't. It always looks really laboured to me. I can make (somewhat) graceful-looking lines while thinking up visual ideas, but the same does not seem to apply with words and sentences.

So, what was old WB is now that "generic" studio lot on Sunset--Sunset-Bronson? Wasn't that grand white KTLA building Warner Bros also at this time, further down the road? And what's now Warners Hollywood(near the Formosa Cafe) was the Pickford-Fairbanks/Goldwyn studio? I'm always so confused by the Warners layout over the course of the 30s-40s.